Politics

The PM has said that she has decided not to press ahead with her plans to reintroduce foxhunting. May wanted a vote in Parliament, which would have ended the ban on this blood sport, if it had gone the Government’s way. This U-turn could anger rural Tories in Conservative heartlands. She told BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that she had “not changed” her personal view on hunting. She went on to say: “If I look back at the messages that we...

Fire and Fury, the tell-all book on Donald Trump, is set to be released early in the UK after the president's lawyers tried to shut it down. The book’s author, Michael Wolff, talked to several people about the presidential campaign and Trump's early days in the white house including Steve Bannon, his one-time confidant. About 250,000 copies of the book have already been shipped, with publishers Holt & Co saying there has been "unprecedented demand" for the publication. If you're struggling to...

Everyone apart from the Health Secretary seemed to see this crisis coming a mile off says union GMB, the union for NHS workers, has demanded Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt resigns as the NHS crisis tailspins into catastrophe. Already in 2018 tens of thousands of non-emergency operations have been postponed, while the latest NHS figures show in the final week of 2017 almost 5,000 ambulances had to wait more than an hour to handover the patient to hospital. Before Christmas, GMB...

Tens of thousands of ambulances were dispatched with single crew in Scotland over the past four years. Despite the Scottish government previously saying single-crewing should occur only in "exceptional circumstances", a FOI request has today revealed that paramedics were sent out on their own to 2,204 emergency call-outs in 2016/17, and 3,514 went out the year before. The numbers have followed an upward trajectory since the data was first collected in 2013, when 1,644 ambulances were sent out with a...

The majority of Conservatives want to bring back the death penalty as a punishment, a major study of political activists has found. Academics have branded Tory members a "breed apart" from their Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP counterparts after research revealed stark differences between them on a range of issues. The report by Queen Mary University of London found 54 per cent of Conservatives were in favour of the death penalty, compared to 23 per cent of SNP supporters, 9 per...

Jeremy Hunt is odds-on to lose his job as Secretary of State for Health. The embattled minister is overseeing one of the worse crises in NHS history this January, with 55,000 operations cancelled. Dr Taj Hasan, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, was one of many doctors to recently speak out about the scale of the crisis, warning that "we are seeing conditions people have not seen in their working lives." Dr Nick Scriven, President of the Society...

A video of a speech in the European Parliament by Spanish MEP Esteban Gonzales Pons is going viral on social media. The rousing talk highlights the problems currently being faced on the continent, highlighting the importance of unity in a time of great instability. He said: "Europe is currently bound to the North by populism and to the South by refugees drowned in the sea. "To the East by Putin's tanks, to the West by the Trump Wall. "In the past...

Jeremy Corbyn's shadow rail minister Andy McDonald was left stranded on a broken down Virgin Train en route to a rail fares protest in Leeds. The East Coast line has had the benefit of a £2 billion payout over the last over the last few weeks and it comes hot on the heels of today's 3.6 per cent increase in rail fares. McDonald said on his Facebook page: "My day of campaigning has been brought to a halt due to a...

The Labour party go in to 2018 two points ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, according to the latest data. Jeremy Corbyn's party would take 42 per cent of the vote if we had an election tomorrow, with the embattled Conservatives narrowly behind on 40 per cent. The so-called "Lib Dem surge" seems to have amounted to very little with the party remaining on 7 per cent of the vote. UKIP (4 per cent) and the Green Party (1...